Sanctified
by Solus Nemo
Summary: “As surely as the blade’s course is run, maybe my kingdom’s finally come.” GabrielSylar Preseries though obviously I didn’t mean it to be
1. One

**Title:** Sanctified  
**Author: **"Solus Nemo"  
**Summary:** "As surely as the blade's course is run, maybe my kingdom's finally come." Sylar/Gabriel G.  
**Author's Note:** Just came to me as most things do. This story centers itself between "**How to Stop an Exploding Man**" and "**Kindred**", though not so much anymore. I don't know whether or not to make this a one shot, it's so long already – eight pages at last count.

Rating for adult language, violence, themes.**  
Disclaimer:** Trent Reznor would own the song "Sanctified" and that short little lyric I use for set-up. Tim Kring and all the wonderful people behind "Heroes" would own anything and/or anyone related to the show.

**ONE**

"_As surely as the blade's course is run, maybe my kingdom's finally come."_

The first time he had ever actually helped his father with a project

_("restoration, Gabriel. We _restore_")_

other than dropping the impulse jewel onto the floor was in the late afternoon in mid-winter, around his fourteenth birthday. It was after school and so the sun was already setting, bathing Gabriel's small part of the world in an apricot deeply reminiscent of orange flavored jell-o.

Sparkling fruit inspired gelatin clung to the edges of his father's shop windows, keening to the decal of a watch face, longing to touch the words "Gray & Sons" and hide them away. Gabriel strongly wished the frost would wash away the only promise his father had made to his son, would surely ever keep — a life sentence in _restoring_ timepieces.

He frowned, standing inside of his father's watch shop, surrounded by — chocking on — the weight of a thousand ticking clocks, feeling the cold and bitter kiss of that promise etched in glass.

Gabriel Gray, son of a watchmaker and doomed to be a watchmaker himself, wanted no part in "Gray & Sons", not even a distant acquaintance. He was more than happy at home, dissecting the toaster in the passive gaze of his mother's infant snow globe collection. He was quite content with sitting at the kitchen table and putting that toaster back together — maybe even better than before he had ever touched it — just to start all over again. For Gabriel had a

_(kind eye and soft touch_)

way with mechanical objects. He could easily see the inner workings of things, what connected to what and where and why. It was just a knack he had, a certain _je ne se quoi_ with complex bits of engineering. Gabriel had no problem when it came to shop class, could get an engine to turn over before many of the older boys realized that the awkward black glob they were looking at was called the starter. As a child he had been able to build a Tinker Toy ferris wheel without ever once having to look at the tube for direction.

His mother always insisted that his ability was a gift from God, whereas he was convinced it was nothing special — a fancy that stemmed from the strange maelstrom in his chest, churning with the sinister ardor that comes with the need of being, of doing. It was a complex in a way, a desire to be God. Not his mother's God because he didn't believe in his mother's God as he should, but a God. A Deity._ Important_. To have the power of manipulation, the almighty ability to alter things and choose who and what lives or dies… that would mean everything, it would mean that a watchmaker's son had a place in the world. A place in the world other than a desk outfitted with bright lights and magnifying lenses, littered with the many bones of broken timepieces in need of _restoration_.

Oh, how he hated that world, "restoration". It wasn't very much a justifiable loathing either, but a feral reaction to the future laid out before him. The word seemed to defile the very picture that Gabriel longed to see, a future with him behind a gleaming steel desk putting together the machine that will change the world as anyone knew it. The word seemed to whisper with vile breath what Gabriel knew but could never address, that he could never be what he truly wanted to be because everything was laid out before him, etched in the window.

"Gray & Sons", where clocks are not just repaired, they are restored — where Gabriel Gray stood on that cold winter day, watching the plight of orange frost on the window.

He stood in the middle of the showroom, hundreds of clocks sounding as one with such a deafening cacophony as to give Gabriel a headache if it hadn't become white noise. He couldn't hear the death song of his future, that rhythmic _tick tock tick_, but he could feel it. It pricked his skin much like a hot needle, boring into him in search of his soul.

This place was a dismal one, perhaps the very inspiration for many of Poe's more horrific stories, and one in which Gabriel believed he would die. He had been convinced of this since his early childhood, when the nightmares were quite vivid and frightful in their simplicity.

In those dreams the store was neither opened nor closed, but in a limbo of unknowing because the dreamer had never been able to see the sign on the door. Sleeping intuition had always told him that the finer details — dark emptiness — always pointed toward the logical conclusion that the shop was closed, and for good.

For ever would the door be shut and the sign turned round, for ever would the darkness be creeping over the world and raping white to black. For ever would Gabriel be lying on the scratched hardwood floor, for ever in the shadow of the window's clock face.

There was no blood in any of those dreams, no angry villain with a pension for killing things nor a freak accident born from the tired and distracted mind. There was only Gabriel's dead body, his loafer clad feet facing the door and bespectacled head turned to forever stare with clouded grey eyes his father's spiteful gift.

Those gifts, the clocks, were never white noise in his dreams. They were a raging chorus of throaty mewls and high-pitched screams. Twelve throaty mewls and high-pitched screams. Always a chorus of deafening caterwauling in the pitch black, twelve versus, no more and no less, sounding out to no living creature but to a dead man on the floor in the shadow of a clock decal.

"Gray & Sons" burnt into the fabric of his cardigan.

Standing there in the shop at fourteen, willing the now red-orange frost to eat away the promise of a man more devoted to clocks than his own son — hell bent on giving that son a legacy of non-importance, of worthlessness — and be rid of that dark token, throw it into the violent maelstrom in Gabriel's chest that writhed with the yearning to be important.

"Special."

Gabriel turned from the window, the pustule disease which proclaimed a life so futile, and addressed his father with a weak "huh?"

The man hunched over the desk at the far end of the store, half-hidden by a wall, did not lift his head from his current

_(project)_

restoration. The husband to Virginia Gray, father to Gabriel, merely continued tinkering away at the cuckoo clock before him. Black Forest, Germany — "made in der woods by elves" or was that BMW? — circa 1880 by LFS, Lorenz Furtwangler & Söhne. It didn't need much, just a replacement lifting wire or two to go along with the bellow tops. Which was a good thing to Gabriel, for the piece nearly made his eyes bleed when he first saw it come into the shop.

The cuckoo clock was huge, three feet high and over two feet wide. On its well-kept face were two beautifully ornate hands, but other than that Gabriel had no good things to say about the piece. It featured a rich oak case entirely ensconced with deer antlers and crowned with a pair of elk, dotted with wild boar teeth, carved roses from what might have been one of the deer skulls, and — last but certainly not least — in place of a bird there was a ghastly carved boar's head holding sentinel right about the twelve marker.

Gabriel's lip curled just thinking about that clock. It was hidden from view behind the wall, yet he could still see it clear as day and heard it calling to him, urging him to ram his eyes through with one of the deer antlers so he couldn't look at it anymore.

Bile searing away the back of his throat, the watchmaker's son pushed his glasses further up his adolescently greasy nose with his thumb.

"What's special, Dad?" he asked.

The watchmaker leaned back in his chair, rolled his shoulders in order to get the stiffness out.

Gabriel always liked to believe that he took after his mother, but unfortunately that was a lie. Once he grew into himself, if ever he would, he was sure to find himself looking just like the man thrusting a pathetic life into his, Gabriel's, hands. The height, the dark hair, the stern face only softened by thick framed glasses and greased back tresses, the black eyes and the curse of overactive hair follicles and having to shave them down ten times a day — it was all there.

He had his mother's vulnerability, sure, but what did that count toward? Gabriel was his father through and through. He was destined to curl up beside a popping fire and read _The Complete History of Watchmaking: Complete and Unabridged with Indexes and Footnotes_ — hell, he'd write the damned thing.

Gabriel's sneer turned into a frown and he sighed, wishing he hadn't asked his father what was so special because on a major level he already knew the answer.

"_This_," his father said with arms outstretched to the clocks on the wall, nodded toward the timepieces in the glass cases scattered about the room. "All of this, Gabriel, that's what's special. Keeping time, it's a very important thing. Where would we be without it?"

"Better off" Gabriel wanted to reply, but he shrugged a shoulder instead. He had already had the "What if I want to be an engineer instead of a watchmaker?" chat with his father and it hadn't gone as well as a ten-year-old Gabriel planned. A little leniency, a little freedom, why was that too much to ask for?

The watchmaker smiled and waved his son over to the workbench, to the monstrosity laid out for all to behold.

"This shop is our family's legacy, Gabriel. It belonged to my father and when I become unfit it will pass on to you. You should be proud, son."

"Why can't it go to one of your brother's kids, make _them_ proud?" never made it beyond Gabriel's teeth. He walked over to his father in silence but for the howling of the maelstrom in his chest. It pressed against his heart — was his heart — and made it hard for the watchmaker's son to breathe.

He didn't want this. He didn't want to live with a seething want in him to go on unfulfilled, to spend the rest of his life with "Inept" scratched onto his World Name Tag. He wanted to be "Special", "Important", maybe even "God". Instead he was —

"Gabriel, that's why I think it's time."

The watchmaker's son stared hard at the Black Forest cuckoo splayed out on the table. It was vile, the way it laid there, yet he couldn't look away. "Time for what?" he asked, cringing against the clock and the twisted way in which it lay.

"Why, to finish restoring this old girl here, what else?" His father laughed, a sound which always seemed false to Gabriel. "I'm nearly done here, but you can outfit her with her new weights and test her out."

The last thing Gabriel wanted to do was that, but his father was already moving aside to let his son in closer to the beast on the table.

A groan resounded deep within Gabriel's throat.

The watchmaker patted his son squarely on the back and stepped further back behind the boy. It was a memorable moment for him, like a first date or winning touchdown pass in the Super Bowl. Gabriel, on the other hand, just wanted to get it over with. He wanted to go back to the kitchen and disassemble the coffee maker, maybe work on his inaugural speech for whenever he became president of the United States.

It was easy enough to hang the clock on the wall six feet off the ground. It was a cake walk to hang the pendulum, shaped not like a leaf but another bone rose, to the pendulum leader at the bottom of the clock. The problems came when it was time to outfit the hideous clock with its chains.

Gritting his teeth, trying to suppress a screech, Gabriel took one of the thin chains from the table and forced the maelstrom in his chest to calm enough for him to take a breath. It did not calm and he did not get breath, and so he had to delve lightheaded into the clock

_(God, oh God)_

and attach the chain in his hand to one of the sprockets inside the housing. Sickened in a way he could not explain, staring pathetically at the boar's head in its little house, Gabriel repeated the process with the three other chains. Puss in his throat the color of the promise etched in the window, Gabriel attached the iron weights to the chains.

Ill and wishing to be rid of the over-accessorized clock, Gabriel gently swung the bone rose pendulum to the right and set his left ear close enough to the clock — but far enough away for comfort — and heard that the ticking was uneven. His talent for seeing how things work allowed him the knowledge that he needed to swing the base of the clock a centimeter to the right. He set the time, glad that there were thirty minutes yet to the next hour, and wound the clock by pulling the free ends of the chain in order to raise the weights to the base of the clock.

The deed was done. Staring at the bone roses and antlers and closed door to the home of the boar's head, Gabriel not only felt dirty but also the electric current of that maelstrom in his chest reverberate throughout his body.

No, he did not want the life of a watchmaker, but that was what he had been gifted.

His present, his promise of futility, waited for him every day with a dark hubris that crashed down upon Gabriel like a particularly malevolent storm surge. Every day after school, per his father's request, he would slog down the grimy streets of Brooklyn to his _gift_. Every day he would stop in front of the words "Gray & Sons", glower and bemoan the future waiting for him and be struck dumb by the arrogance of his prison.

"Gabriel," it seemed to say in a voice slick with pompousness, "aren't you the luckiest boy alive? Stuck with me until you fall dead upon my beaten old floor."

At which point Gabriel would walk with dragging heels into the pustule abyss of emptiness.

And so it went for six more years, until the day his father walked out into the proverbial fog.

Gabriel had been nursing the wounds of a rather mean college rejection letter at the time – "_You_ in MIT? A silly little man like you? How quaint, how absurd!" – and had no interest in dueling with that fetid promise etched in glass. He went anyway, the maelstrom in his chest no longer howling in indecipherable rage but screaming – SCREAMING – with a disparaging rapture which actually pained him.

Sickened by agony – who was he to think that he could ever be something? – it had taken Gabriel a full ten minutes to realize that his mother's frantic telephone calls, the ones hounding him all day, had not been exaggerations after all.

"Your father's gone", and so he appeared to be.

"No calls, Gabriel, not one", and the dormant alarm on the store's answering machine called truth.

"Just left – without a word", and the insidious lack of a 'dear son' Post-It confirmed his mother's tear-soaked eighteenth message.

"What are we to do?" had been her latest question, one Gabriel could not hear for the enraged whirlpool in his chest. The hateful thing had – finally – begun to swallow him.

He stood with the phone to his ear, staring at the most abhorred words etched into the window and suddenly everything

_("... appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon ... streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.")_

was gone. Everything Gabriel had ever looked forward to in his life, any chance of getting away from the bleakness the words "Gray & Sons" betrayed was burnt into a fine black cinder. His father had gone, leaving his only son with these dreams now dashed and the task of caring for timepieces.

And as he stood there, lost in the center of his long festering maelstrom, those timepieces laughed at him. Their rhythmic _tick-tock_ing changed hands from passive to capricious. They stared with faces no longer blank but sardonic, cruel. Their smiles were acidic in their contempt.

* * *

01.) The clock I describe (found on eBay, search for "black forest antler&teeth" under cuckoo clocks) is very real and actually not _as_ hideous as teenage Gabriel Gray thinks it is, though for the sake of the story I made it into a cuckcoo. The company, LFS (Lorenz Furtwangler & Söhne, note the "& Son" which was completely unintentional on my part) was an actual clock company in Germany, circa 1836 or thereabouts. 

02.) Quotation sited about Gabriel's turmoil is from Edgar Allen Poe's "A Decent into a Maelstrom".

Originally I had paved this epic to be a oneshot, set between the first season's finale and the second season's third episode (in which we learn that Sylar is very much alive). When I began to write this, however, it didn't want to stay within any boundries.


	2. Two

**TWO**

Gabriel terminated his mother's phone call somewhere between "he showed no signs of being unhappy" and the twentieth, tear sodden recitation of "what are we to do?" He slammed the store's phone down into its cradle with such force that his hand began to ache, a persistent pain from deep within the bone – deep within Gabriel's churning maelstrom soul.

Almost immediately after the phone clanged back into its home with a bell-like groan, it began to ring again.

It was a high-pitched noise, right on the cusp of not being able to be heard by humans at all. Dogs certainly, but not humans, and as the phone kept on ringing Gabriel might have been humored by the image of the entire population of Brooklyn's dogs running toward the clock shop if he hadn't been so angry. As the phone kept on ringing Gabriel kept on wallowing in his anger, to the point where the word "angry" was a gross understatement.

Gabriel was incensed, enraged to the point that his entire body felt as though it was on fire – writhing tendrils of flame caressing every inch of him, wrapping around his arms and legs in the hugging embrace of a lover he had never cared to know, stroking him and whispering that wrath was not a sin but a thing in which to be proud. It kissed and tickled his ear as it coerced Gabriel into acting upon his rage. The arms of flame reached out and touched with graceful fingers the clocks on the walls, the delicate timepieces in the velvet lined glass cases, but it did not set them ablaze.

As the answering machine kicked in – "Gabriel? GABRIEL? What's wrong, why did you hang up the phone? Are you all right, why aren't you answering me?" – as Gabriel's mother tried to reach her son again, the phone screeching in the somber afternoon, the watchmaker's son bit down into his tongue. The overwhelming taste of copper churned his stomach, but he himself felt no discomfort.

He hoped his father would die.

Gabriel hoped that his father only made it five blocks from the house before some punk crack addict shot him straight through the head for dope funds. Wherever he was, Gabriel just hoped that he was dead. Massive coronary, drug money hold-up, misstep into an uncovered manhole – it didn't very much matter as long as Gabriel's deserting father was dead and gone and never coming back – because he didn't deserve to come back, not after pulling a stunt like this.

A young Gabriel had hated his father before, thought that there had to have been a mix-up at the hospital and he had been brought home with the wrong people. God hated him and that was why He let a nurse hopped up on the crisp white pain pills from the storage cupboard switch two babies' identification bracelets around. God hated Gabriel and that was why He let a child with all the hopes and dreams of the world rot in a household better suited to the Asylums of old.

That conviction had been deepened within a six-year-old Gabriel at his first school play – the pinnacle of a boy's life, right after the first baseball game which Gabriel had yet to come across. It was only a very bad version of The Wizard of OZ, complete with very bad '80s hair, but it had meant everything to Gabriel.

As a child – as an adult – he had a rough go at getting along with the other students in his class. They were relentless, always teasing him and tripping him and screaming with disgust whenever he tried to play with them. In fact, they went out of their way explaining that Zoo – Candyland, House, Cars, Space Cadet, Tea Party – could only be played with four people, not five. Odd numbers were icky and Gabriel was an odd number. But then Icky Gabriel had gotten the position of lead tree in his elementary school's adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.

His mother was very proud – gushing – when Gabriel ran down the hall yelling the news, one arm in his puffy winter coat and the other flailing through the air, his mittens bouncing up and down on their coat cuff strings and grey winter hat left on the ground somewhere between the

_(basement there's a tyger in the basement)_

bathroom and the peg-board for Miss Smith's room, plastered with her class's pictures of snowmen and snowflakes and Sandy Claws and reindeer. In Gabriel's class two weeks ago they had drawn pictures as well, but Miss Radke had strung them together with red-and-green yarn and hung them across the ceiling in a giant M. Well, all but Gabriel's because she hadn't liked his rather superb reproduction of "Sandy Claws Being Eaten By Rudolph". Just his hand, anyway, for teasing Big Nose with a cookie, but he still received a note to send home to his parents.

That picture, gone now wherever disturbing childhood portraits go, was the least of Gabriel's worries as he walked home from school with his mommy. He was the lead tree in The Wizard of Oz, there was no time to dwell on disrespected drawings. His part in the play was a big deal now, much bigger than a Sandy Claws with a chewed off hand.

In fact, his position of lead tree had been such a big deal that he and his mother had not gone home but to the clock shop to relay this bit of exciting news to Gabriel's father –

Who had been less than enthused.

He never said it out loud, of course, but it had been evident in the way in which Gabriel's father spoke. "A tree?" he said, the disappointment dripping like foul green slime from the words. Just a tree? The anguish of being pulled away from a _project_ had shone like a million fireflies in his eyes, but he didn't stop his wife from running off to the craft store and buying up anything even remotely tree-ish they had. In the glow of her tiny collection of snow globes – eight, the New England colonies and New York State – he said nothing as his wife had his only son stand on a stack of phone books as she pinned and chalked and sewed his tree costume together. He said nothing as his wife asked for the tenth time on the Big Day if he would close the shop early and come to the school – _said_ nothing but looked at Gabriel, standing there in his ridiculous tree costume, with an expression that would have killed the Wicked With of the East better than any falling house.

Gabriel was convinced that his father wasn't coming, that the look was obviously what it seemed: that his father

_(hates you he hates you)_

had better things to do than sit down in a room full of runny-nosed children with about as much talent as a stick.

Standing on the stage, though, sweating from the bright lights and sore from standing so long without being able to put his arms down and sick from the joy of it all Gabriel saw that his father _was_ there. His mother must have frozen hell over because his father was there, smack dab in the middle of the front row – with a glower on his face the size of the not-yet-fallen Soviet Union.

Through the crushing death of the Wicked Witch of the East Gabriel's father was there. Through the song and dance routine in Munchkin Land – the scene in which all the talking trees had been allowed to sing and dance too – Gabriel's father was there. Through the introductions and peppy music verses with the scarecrow Gabriel's father was there. Then came the apple picking scene.

Gabriel was herded back on stage after the scene change with the scarecrow – which really consisted of nothing more than a few people changing positions and the addition of the Tin Woodsman and his giant sheet of paper house – and was close to wetting his costume with delight. His big moment was coming up, the moment when Dorthy and the scarecrow decided they were hungry enough to pick apples from the talking apple trees and Gabriel would yell at them.

Grinning like the little idiot he was, standing there in a dreadful tree costume unable to put his arms down, Gabriel looked out into the audience and only saw his mother sitting there next to an empty seat, a badly disguised frown on her face.

It was there that Gabriel missed his line for the tears and snot running down his cheeks and into his mouth. It was there that Gabriel learnt that disappointment tasted a lot like mucus-y salt.

And now his father was doing it again.

Gabriel's father was walking out on his son and leaving him to stand alone in a room he didn't want, had never wanted. Gabriel's father was setting the future in motion, the one ending with a dead body on the floor in loafers and a green cardigan.

The rage like all consuming fire swelled and ebbed against the ebony walls of the maelstrom that was no longer in Gabriel's chest.

Who was his father to leave him like this again? Who was he to throttle his only child with a future devoid of any meaning? _How dare he_ walk out of the picture like that, without so much as a "good riddance" – without so much as a _warning_ to his son, a tiny heads up that in so many hours all of Gabriel's hopes of escape, of _meaning_, would go up in smoke. How dare that _man_ – he was certainly no father to Gabriel now – leave an unwanting, unwilling boy to do this bastard's bidding, to stand in the shadow of

_(worthlessness you're worthless)_

that ginning watch face decal and those putrid _words_. Those words from which there was no hope of running, no, not anymore. Those words, etched in the window, forever proclaiming a watchmaker's son's fate of nothingness. Those spiteful little words which grinned so snidely as the phone rang and rang and rang. Those cantankerous words which laughed so daftly as Gabriel's mother begged and pleaded with her son through the answering machine to pick up the phone and talk to her. Oh! how they laughed and grinned, those words back lit with all the light of hell, those cruel and all knowing words. How they grinned down upon Gabriel as if they had known all along about this day, about how

_(small nameless inept)_

far down the hole Gabriel had always been, since his cog-and-wheel inspired first birthday cake.

Those conniving and hateful words, those bitter and –

Gabriel tore the incessantly ringing phone from the table, lacerated the jack with the wall and with a primeval scream more frightening than the caterwauling depths of his

_(maelstrom)_

soul he heaved the whining beast at that most despised promise.

And as if that fetid promise had sprouted hands the phone fell a good foot short of the window and rattled its way across the scuffed floor to bite at the baseboard.

It was then that Gabriel fell to the floor and began to weep as he had done as a child of six at the school play. He wept from the very depths of his

_(soul)_

maelstrom, surrounded on all sides by churning black, struck by the oppressive golden light of three simple and otherwise nonthreatening words when not strung together.

"Gray & Sons"

* * *

01.) The comment about a "tyger" in the basement is a reference to Stephen King's short story **"Here There Be Tygers"** (from the collection called **"Skeleton Crew"**). Basement is Maine slang for bathroom. 

02.) "Sandy Claws" would be the name Jack Skellington gives the plump red fellow in the movie _"The Nightmare Before Christmas"_. I know the movie is now a rather disgusting trend and I loathe that with every fibre of my being but, that movie was a very large part of my childhood in 1993 so you will forgive that very poor plug.

03.) Any butchering to the book/musical/gaggle of school plays (of) "**The Wizard of Oz**" is my fault and I apologize profusely. I think I have the time line correct but it would not be surprising at all if I were to be proven wrong. I'm also sure that the talking apple trees speak when Dorthy and the Scarecrow begin taking their fruit, but they might not. Seeing as how this was a play for 6 - 14 year olds, however, I am fairly sure that the teachers would want all students to have a memorable part and since Gabriel was the main tree….

As you can see I've taken great liberties with the attitude of Gabriel's father and the mind of Virginia Gray for not noticing any outward signs of her husband's unhappiness. I've also written Gabriel as a tantrum laden child, what with him falling to the floor and crying like that but, take in mind that this kid just had every single dream of breaking away and being somebody raped from his person. I think you'd cry, too. A bit of hubris on my part: it's my story and I can do what I want. (insert frown-y face from author here)


	3. Three

**THREE**

Hero worship is engraved into the human psyche, a feral reaction much like breathing – or a blank note card handed to every child at birth with a small inscription of "Print hero's name here" in the babes' respective languages, along with the equally tiny typed warning of "It is advisable to think long and hard about this, for you are only issued one card per lifetime." So, assuming that one could write infinitesimally small on one's sole Hero Worship Card, most of the human population has a single, lone hero – two if one simply cannot choose between one's parents or a whole group of people if one had a frontal lobe lobotomy in early childhood and as a result is completely incapable of decision.

Gabriel believed more heartily in the latter scenario, the more colorful and whimsical picture of a stiff-looking man in a black suit trotting about the world with ten million suitcases filled with blank note cards in every language on earth – even the ones that went extinct because Note Card Man is a very busy one and has not the time to sit down and sort through his many suitcases.

In his twenty years of living the watchmaker's son turned watchmaker took to grasping tightly the image of Note Card Man with a job more crummy than the one just plopped into Gabriel's lap. Note Card Man is perpetually in his late forties – too old for the rowdy scenes of youth but too young for the downright terrifying responsibility of middle age. Note Card Man is known simply as such, his name long forgotten in the dusty back halls of Western hospitals or maybe one of the tin shacks in the squaller of the Third World. Note Card Man cannot remember, he's too busy with the millions of children born each day to even care.

The man no longer with a name – he's sure it was something dreadful like Hubert and not something drop-dead-cool-though-it-came-from-a-strung-up-hippy-parent-and-not-legalized-until-the-age-of-seven like Dweezil – he goes about his daily routine in a black suit forever over-starched and therefor must remember to execute severe caution in his movements, lest he tear his only suit right up the seat of his pants.

Staying clear of sudden movements that could result in dire consequences, Note Card Man works around the clock. Sleep is only a word to the man slipping Hero Worship Cards into newborns' hands; he hasn't slept since the dawning of the age

_(of Aquarius) _

and is too preoccupied running around with his ten million suitcases to even remember what being tired feels like. Note Card Man went numb long ago to such silly things as tiredness and sleep and prefers to spend his time mulling over his hatred toward his job – which he actually doesn't dislike as passionately as he once did. This he can do when he's not racing around hospitals and one room shacks, passing out Hero Worship Cards with all the pizazz of Boston Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. Note Card Man is always racing around and so he has no time to lament over his poor career choice.

Gabriel, however, lying on the beaten old floor of the clock shop like a fool, had a lot of time to lament over his choices or lack thereof.

He knew that lying on the floor like a dead slug was a bad idea – not because of the throng of people outside the doors and windows surely looking in at him and proving the theory that all people are ravenous busy-bodies with a pension for other peoples' suffering, but because his mother was more than likely throwing on her coat and shuffling over to the store as fast as her nervous feet could carry her. It would not be fun if she was racing over to Gabriel, it would not be a happy thing if she came in the clock shop and found him lying on the ground like the sniveling rot he was, it would not be "cool" to have to explain himself – the rude hang up and the phone torn from the wall and thrown, badly, across the room.

Gabriel knew that it would be prudent of him to get up from the floor and – and what?

Pick the phone up from the ground and plug it back into the jack and answer the phone when it immediately began to ring, assuming that his mother was too much of a wreck to leave the house? And after he sorted things out with the phone, he'd have to take care of the store. He'd have to sit down his father's – his, it was his now – workbench and wait for the people to come. Of course, they wouldn't come because this was the late 90s and if peoples' cable boxes didn't tell the time their three dollar, battery operated Wal-Mart wall clock did.

So people wouldn't come, but Gabriel would still have to go through the motions. He'd have to sweep the floor and dust the timepieces and sit down at his father's - _his_ - workbench and start to work on fixing a new clock. He'd have to toil away the time until five O'clock and then close up shop, turn out the lights and flip the sign and lock the door. He'd have to come back tomorrow – not after his afternoon class but before even his morning class – he'd have to skip school all together and open the shop. He'd have to come down here at eight in the morning and get ready for the day, then at nine O'clock on the dot he'd have to flip the sign to open and unlock the door. Then he'd have to repeat the process all over again.

Open. Clean. Kill time. Close. Open. Clean. Kill time. Close.

Over and over again, day in and day out for all the rest of eternity all because his father left him.

Gabriel pulled his knees to his chest.

There was no way out of this now, he couldn't just leave and never come back because his fate was sealed. It was sealed tighter than an infectious diseases laboratory in the heart of Ebola country. That window said it all, "Gray & Sons" beneath the decal of a watch face. That window spelt out the cruel fate played out in all of Gabriel's childhood nightmares.

Unless he ran away.

Which was a completely and totally inane thing to do.

If Gabriel ran off into the sunset he'd only be as good as his father and right then he disliked his father with great intensity. If Gabriel ran away he'd _really_ be "Inept" to the world, he would have nothing whatsoever. There was absolutely no way that Gabriel could find meaning if he ran off into the woods and died from a broken ankle which prevented him from crawling back home at a pace that would deter hungry wolves.

If only he could, though. If only he could run away, and if he could he'd run away to Alaska. Since he'd been a fourteen-year-old kid sitting in front of a late-breaking news story he'd been convinced that the only place he would ever run away to would be Alaska – to the shrine of the only hero in his life, the man whose name was scrawled in wobbly chicken scratch on Gabriel's Hero Worship Card, afflicted with episodes of stupidity though that man was. If only he could Gabriel would continue on where that hero had left off, going out into the wild to prove the worth of humanity – or at least himself, holed up in a decaying bus for 112 days for maybe nothing more than spiritual fulfillment. And through that quest, ironically for a man who detested modern civilization, or most of it, along with its trappings, that through his journey he would become famous.

By following in his hero's footsteps Gabriel might also become famous. A household name with hundreds if not thousands of people making the pilgrimage – and it was, a pilgrimage – to his death site, a rotting mattress in that equally rotting bus. To see his jeans patched with an old army blanket and duct tape, folded up neatly on a shelf. To see his blue toothbrush resting just where their God had placed it going on six years ago, his boots by the oil drum stove, his disposable razor, the bag of feathers and down and severed bird wings, the bones of the game he had killed with such pride, his inscriptions on the walls framing the plaque a mother and father left behind for their son.

And no one would take these things, these trinkets of a fallen boy.

They would flock to a bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness for that boy. They would take nothing of that boy's, who was careless enough to not learn the proper way to preserve moose flesh in the arctic, to leave a sizable amount of rice behind in the car that dropped him off at the mouth of his demise, to buy non-insulated, non-waterproof boots at JC Penny.

They would revere him as a God for running off and getting himself killed, as Gabriel had at the age of fourteen, who would soon after that newscast shove his hands inside of a vile and horrific cuckoo clock, who six years after that would be lying on the floor of the clock shop left to him by a deserting father. They would revere him as a God because that boy had been the very definition of bravery, running headlong into his beliefs the way many cannot, because that boy had done what Gabriel knew he could not do – get away.

No, Gabriel could not run away to Alaska in retaliation for what his father had done to him. He could not go to that bus in the middle of the wilderness and sign his name into one of the many yellowing notebooks by the oil drum stove. He could not stand beside that decrepit mattress and ponder all the whys surrounding the memory of his hero and his hero's God-like stature.

Gabriel could never be important in that way. He was now a watchmaker – no longer just a watchmaker's son – and he could not flee from that. He could, however, peel himself from the floor and go home. Home, away from the prying mother he did not want to deal with. Home, away from the store that was now his. Home, where maybe – just maybe – Gabriel would get lost along the path to and become famous in the way of his hero.

His dreams had all been reduced to ash, but that didn't stop Gabriel from tossing hope against the churning walls of his prison whirlpool.

* * *

The next chapter will not be as short as this one. Chapter three wanted itself (yes, this story seems to have a mind of its own) to be more of a filler, a continuance of Gabriel's temper tantrum, if you will. I promise, too, that I'll have more action in here - hence some quirky, off-beat references to things that seem to be out of place. This story is not turning out anything like I had planned it to. It's kind of exciting, actually.

01.) The reference to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is from a song (The Fifth Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In") that is played on the preset radio station at my place of employment at least three times a day. The song was based on the belief that at the end of the 20th century the world would move into "the Age of Aquarius" – an age of love, light, humanity and legalized weed for all! (well, not really) Astronomically the Age of Aquarius will not begin until 2654, when I'll be long gone and hopefully so will this silly fascination and undying trend with the 1960s/1970s. Bring back the 1920s, won't you?!

02.) If you've seen the footage of Jonathan Papelbon running around in his shorts, drenched in wine and dancing the Irish Jig at their victorious win of the ALCS you'll understand why I used him as a shameless plug for pizazz.

03.) Christopher J. McCandless, idiot to some and hero to many. In April 1992, at the age of twenty-four, he trekked into the Stampede Trail of Alaska (nearabouts Healy) and on September 6, 1992 his corpse was found in his mother's hand sewn sleeping bag by two hikers and a group of moose hunters - 112 days after beginning his Alaskan Odyssey, 19 days after his death. The remains weighed only 67 pounds and the official cause of death was ruled as starvation.

I cannot recommend highly enough the documentery by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, "_The Call of the Wild_", released circa 2007. In the documentary Ron follows Chris's path as closely as humanly possible, running into Sean Penn and his cronies on numerous occassions along the way. During this time Ron interviews people who knew Chris as well as random people he comes across in his journey (like a carload of pot-smoking teenagers who understand nothing of the concept of LIFE which Chris strived for so passionately). Ron also identifies the blatant lies told by Jon Krakauer and, because the movie is based on the book, Sean Penn.

But because few have ever heard, let alone seen, the documentary....

Christopher McCandless's story was chronicled by Jon Krakauer in the book "_Into the Wild_", where the author poses many an erroneous scenario.

A.) Chris supposedly set off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a ten-pound bag of rice. **This is a lie**.

Chris had placed his wallet inside of a backpack. In this wallet was his Social Security card, voter identification, health card, birth certificate, driver's license and three (count them, three) library cards. Chris also had in his possesion $300 in cash and a road map.

B.) Chris (as posed by Krakauer) ate the seed pods of the wild potato plant to supplement his diet of small game and was thus poisoned by the alkaloids in the plant, which Chris's body would have been able to flush out had he been in robust shape to begin with. The build up of alkaloids in the boy's system prevented any absorption of nutrients from whatever Chris had been able to kill in his final days. **This is another lie**.

Tests on both the wild potato and the wild sweet pea (a resembling plant) prove this theory wrong, as there are no toxins in either plant's seed pods. Because of a journal entry Chris wrote near death ("Fault of pot. seed") Krakauer stands by his theory of starvation though poisoning and suggests that perhaps the seeds had grown moldy, aiding in the seeds' toxicity. Others believe that he died from poisoned mushrooms or giardiasis from drinking untreated water. Still others are convinced that the kid was in over his head, couldn't find his way out of the bush (in July he had tried to cross back over the very swollen Teklanika and go home), couldn't catch enough food and simply starved to death. That might in fact be true, for Chris's biggest fortune had been shooting a moose but failed to preserve it the arctic way (cutting the meat in small strips and letting them air over a makeshift screen). He had tried to smoke the meat per the advice of hunters in South Dakota, where he had once worked at a grain elevator.

**The simple fact of the matter** is that Chris (an Emory University honor-graduate who in 1990 donated his entire life savings ($24,000) to Oxfam International (an organization which fights hunger, note the irony) and began to travel across the country using the monicker "Alexander Supertramp") starved to death. He burned off more calories than he was taking in, his BMI plumited, and there went the ball game.

At the time of his death, Chris's family had not heard from him since his college graduation.

Sean Penn's movie "_Into the Wild_", based upon the book, is now out on DVD.


	4. Four

**FOUR**

It felt as if someone had run him over with a car, then backed up with pretty cherry lights painting the world crimson and run him over again. His chest felt crushed, his ribs broken into jagged spears and making ribbons out of his lungs, his heart pinned around his spine in an unnatural S. His legs, it felt as if he had no legs. He was standing, he was walking – he must have legs – but he could not feel anything below his pelvis, anything at all really but for the pain devouring his heart.

He got up from the floor longing for a gun, cyanide, anything to disrupt the road he was now careening down – maybe in James Dean's cursed 550 Porsche Spyder – at 100 mph.

Gabriel didn't bother to put the phone away, he'd only be bombarded with more phone calls from his mother, who was more than likely filling up the answering machine at his apartment if she was not rushing over to the clock shop. With the latter nightmare in mind, he brushed himself off and went into the bathroom at the back of the store to splash a few handfuls of cold water onto his face.

Dripping, not particularly caring about it, Gabriel walked back into the main sector of the store and felt more strongly than ever that feeling of being repeatedly run over by a car. It was a crippling feeling, ruminating in Gabriel the desire to crawl into a dark corner and just lie there. Let his mother come running into the store with her pink housecoat on, let her ask questions, let her grind glass into her son's skin as she further beat home the fact that Gabriel was now in charge of this sad fate of repairing – restoring – watches.

Weak people throw up their hands and curl up into balls, and Gabriel was a weak person. So let his mother come.

But Gabriel didn't want to see the look in his mother's eyes, that "you could have been so much more had you not let yourself fall into this" flicker about the eyes. He didn't want to see her crying over a man like his father, who proved himself again and again that he only cared about himself – that there'd be someone behind him who could carry on his name when he left.

Gabriel shut off the lights, flipping the one switch he had upturned when stepping into the building. He thought it odd that the door was locked and the light off, but hadn't much time to dwell on the strangeness of such things because of the ringing phone. So he turned off the lone strip of lighting at the back of the store, filling the shadows with the eerie buttermilk glow that always used to unease Gabriel as a child. He turned his back on that spooky glow now gone, on the workbench now his, and stepped out into the crisp afternoon.

The air around his face turning into puffs of fast dissolving mist as he exhaled, Gabriel turned the collar up on his jacket. He locked the door with the small metal key that seemed too modern for the door, for the building, and thought about throwing that key away.

There was a trashcan at the end of the block, he could toss the key in there. It would land upon a half-eaten soft pretzel with mustard, in a lake of cold designer coffee beside a prairie of good-for-one-giggle tabloids. It would sit there until the garbage people came to empty it, then it would reside for all of eternity in the trash heap where it belonged.

He wouldn't even have to do that, either, because someone might see him throw a key away and ask if he was out of his mind. This was New York, no one cared about other people and might not even yell if they saw a woman having her head bashed in against the sidewalk by her husband. But there was always that one person, usually a tourist, who _would_ say something. There was always that one person who'd come chasing after somebody to say they dropped a penny

_(mister)_

and go about the rest of their day with a big smile on their face for saving the world of fewer lost pennies, even if it was only one. Hell, if one of those people saw Gabriel throw his store key away they'd shove their hand in the rotting pile of trash and retrieve it for him. They'd say that they saw him toss away a key and surely he didn't mean to do that. So here it is again

_(mister)_

all safe and sound and he'd just have to another trash can to throw the stinking thing into.

Maybe he could drop it from his hand, though, as he walked. He could scope out all the people lying in their own filth on the streets, tin cup outstretched with a sign proclaiming "NEED MONEY FOR FOOD" or "SICK DAUGHTER PLEASE HELP" or even "WINO IN NEED OF BOOZE" because that hobo was an honest one. Yes, Gabriel could keep an eye out and when he came across a dazed tramp he could drop the key into his tin cup with a pleasant little _plink!_ and be on his way before the tramp ever realized that that was no silver dollar just thrown into his cup.

But it might grow legs and hunt Gabriel down, crawl up onto his kitchen table and greet him with shiny silver teeth and a demonic little "Hello!"

Gabriel frowned at the idea, looking down at a middle aged man tucked out of the way in the shadows of an alley. The man was filthy, dozing with his head leaning against the rusting shopping cart which contained everything he owned – which wasn't much. A few soda cans, milk jugs, a plastic bag filled with what looked to be vegetables not too rotten as to be inedible.

The heart in his crushed chest, twisted around his spine, swelled with an unnamed feeling quite like pity but too angry to be such an emotion. Gabriel didn't pity, and he certainly didn't pity people who chose to live their lies as nameless and worthless under the scrutinizing eye of the world. They would die with no one knowing who they were, without anything caring, without being the least bit special.

Didn't they care?

Didn't they care that when they died no one would come to claim their ashes?

Didn't they care that if someone were to yell their name in the middle of a crowded street years after their death not a single person would lift their head?

Didn't they care that there would be no spiral bound notebook at their death site, yellowing and filled with the red-and-blue inked epitaphs of hundreds of people who've come to see where they died? And if they didn't want to be revered that highly as a hero as Gabriel's was, didn't they just want _somebody_ to have a framed picture of them on a mantelpiece somewhere?

Didn't they want to be remembered? _Special _to someone_, anyone?_

No, Gabriel felt nothing toward these street people that even remotely resembled pity. What he felt, as he walked down the street and away from the clock shop, was a black thing that were it ever to be photographed would look very much like a child's scribbles with a piece of charcoal.

He put his hands in his jacket pockets, still holding onto the key, and turned his attention away from the nameless hobble of people wasting away on the streets. He turned away from them with legs that as if they had been quietly removed while their owner had been lying unconscious in the space of time between crushing car tires, with a body that all together felt too heavy to keep upright – as if every bone in his body, broken and whole, had been replaced with lead.

It seemed to take him an hour to walk the few blocks to the subway station, every woman he passed along the way his mother – crying and yelling at him to talk to him, to tell him where his father had gone and what on earth they were going to do without him. All the men, too, seemed to resemble his father. They all stared hard at Gabriel as he walked down the steps to the subway tunnel – leering with cold eyes and pursed lips. They laughed maliciously as Gabriel, typically a master, swiped his MetroCard through the turnstile two times before getting the hang of it.

Everyone seemed to jostle Gabriel more than usual, jabbing his broken ribs with sharp elbows and stepping on his numb-to-the-point-of-non-being feet. They seemed to holler at him in tones more grave than typical – barking "Get out of the way!", snapping "Move it!" with razor pointed teeth – or maybe it was just Gabriel's imagination. The station could have been empty, but the despondent climate of his mind refused to grapple with the new-found state of things alone.

In fact, as the train came rolling into the station, the electric hum bouncing off the walls and rattling the bones further into Gabriel's lungs, he though he saw a man lying dead on the tracks. A man who looked quite a bit like his father and he hoped it was, he hoped he wasn't playing a twisted game of make-believe.

Of course, though, he was.

As the train came to a stop, Gabriel's father vanished into a puff of bright yellow light.

With a deep sigh that pained his butchered lungs, Gabriel staggered onto the train and collapsed into the nearest seat. He leaned his head back against the window and shut his eyes, listened as the angry people around him clamored into the subway train after him. Some snapped their chewing gum as they came aboard muttering about the latest Yankees trade, a few squeaked like chipmunks about the deal they got at Macy's, most talked loudly into their cellphones.

Before the doors shut, a woman sobbed and Gabriel sat up quickly. He looked around, expectant, and found not his mother running over to him in her pink housecoat and grimy slippers, but a teenager laughing into her cellphone. Her hand was over her mouth, but the smile was evident.

He sneered at the girl and relaxed into his uncomfortable plastic seat, watched the doors bang close and the train begin to head toward his tiny apartment in a land no more joyful than Brooklyn but at least far away from _that building_ left to him by his father.

At least in another borough Gabriel was able to get away from the expectations of his father, of a mother that was nothing herself and desired her son to be everything. Sure, it was only the same place where he had grown up, in an apartment within a demanding walking distance away – but it wasn't the clock shop.

If Gabriel looked out of his bedroom window he didn't have to see "Gray & Sons" lit up like all the lights of Las Vegas, blinding him. If he looked out of his bedroom window he saw Futility, thousands of ants running around in desperation, but at least he was above them looking down. At his home, such as it was, he felt important. It was only in his own head, but looking _down_ at people reinforced his pride just enough.

Sitting in the subway, too, he was able to conform the images around him in his own favor – but it didn't have the same affect as being in his neat little apartment and staring down at all the other people in the world who were just as nameless as he was.

Ants. All anyone was, really, was an ant. Working until their hearts gave out and for nothing. They would have no recognition unless they made themselves into something – unless they _were_. Gabriel didn't know what exactly, but it certainly wasn't an ant, it most definitely wasn't a watchmaker with a maelstrom no longer in his shattered chest that demanded to be something important.

If only Gabriel had a magnifying glass and some sun.

He could be important that way, have his name plastered all over the newspapers for knocking off all the other ants that stood in the way of the bigger picture, the one where Gabriel was "Special".

Or at least more special than the people around him. The man in the two-sizes-too-small Ramones t-shirt, olive drab shorts with the waist size he wore twenty years ago, the faux army cap on his head badly hiding his bald spot – sitting there like he wasn't the washed up fool he was, sitting there and reading his conspiracy book with a faded old bunny rabbit sticking out of the backpack in his lap.

Or the woman across from Mr. Ramones Fan, her grey hair cut into the style all the other girls old enough to be her grandchildren were running into the salons to get. The old woman with her make-up too loud and her clothing way too young, the old woman trying too hard to not die alone perhaps.

Or how about the little boy standing beside his older sister – or knife happy mother? The little boy standing there in his

_(green cardigan)_

hand-me-downs, a sweatshirt too big and pants too low slung. The little boy holding onto his chaperon's hand like if he didn't the entire world would be blown to smithereens and he'd never see his beloved Mets – or so proclaimed his hat – win the World Series. He stared at his

_(loafers)_

raggedy Chuck Taylors as if he knew that World Explosion Day was coming soon. He stared at his shoes as if he was aware of how completely and utterly and hopelessly lost he was in the figurative crowd.

Gabriel stared at this little boy with mild interest, the unsettling and mostly imagined parallels between the boy and himself glowing like a halo around the kid's head. Gabriel stared at this little boy and suddenly came to see that the little boy was lonely – that his heart seemed to beat in a way unfamiliar with the rest of the world because of that loneliness. Gabriel saw and knew that this little boy, winding down on eleven years old, ate alone in the school cafeteria. He knew that the little boy had a very hard time with math problems – with every subject save lunch and gym – because his desk mate didn't like having to share a desk and continually split the tabletop further and further against Mets Fan's favor. He knew that the boy had received only one valentine on Valentine's Day that might have actually meant something, and it hadn't actually been for him.

As he studied the boy Gabriel knew that the boy's hand-me-downs couldn't possibly be hand-me-downs because he was the only boy in the family, that he had no sister and in fact the woman whose hand he was holding_ was_ a knife happy mother – who was not a match, and neither was his father and that's about where the blood-line ended. The joys of having parents who were themselves only children.

Gabriel saw and knew – the boy feeling himself watched and raising his sallow-faced head to gaze like Death at a watchmaker's son turned watchmaker – that the sickness between the kid's bones would finally kill him off in three months, two days, seven hours, thirty-one minutes, eight seconds exactly. On the boy's twelfth birthday.

* * *

It took me until now to realize that Gray & Sons is in Brooklyn while Gabriel's apartment in is Queens, not the other way around.

01.) James Dean's Porsche (the E pronounced as an AH) Spyder, "Little Bastard", took its owner on September 30, 1955. The actor was 24. At 5:59PM at the intersection of Routes 41 and 466 in San Robles, California, James Dean bore-down upon college student Donald Turnupseed as he attempted to make a left turn across the highway. The two cars crashed head-on, pinning Dean (whose car was roofless with a small racing shield) beneath the wreck, dying en-route to the hospital. His passengers were thrown from the car but, comparatively speaking, all right. Turnupseed was not hospitalized for any of his injuries nor charged with the accident.

The car, mangled and nearly torn in two, went on to break a mechanic's leg as it slipped off a trailer. The new owner, George Barris, who bought the wreck for parts, sold the engine to Troy McHenry and the drive-train to William Eschrid. Both were physicians who planned to use the car parts in their own race cars. When the doctors raced their vehicles for the first time after putting in Little Bastard's parts, McHenry's car spun out of control and crashed into a tree – killing him instantly. Eschrid was severely injured when his car rolled, going into a curve.

The car's tires were unharmed during Dean's accident and were sold to a young man who quickly returned them. Both tires had blown simultaneously while he was driving down a road, causing him to run into a ditch.

A young man attempting to steal the steering wheel of the wreckage had his arm torn open on a jagged piece of metal. Another was also injured, trying to take a piece of bloodstained upholstery.

The California Highway Patrol used the car on loan for use in a traveling highway safety exhibit. Two exhibits went by without incident, but prior to the third a garage in Fresno (used to store the car) went up in flames. Everything was destroyed save the Porsche Spyder, which barely suffered even scorched paint.

On the anniversary of Dean's death, at a display in a Sacramento high school, the car fell off of its pedestal after bolts snapped. A student suffered broken bones (conflicting reports site either shattered legs or a broken hip).

A truck driver en route to Salinas lost control, was thrown from the vehicle and subsequently crushed when the Porsche fell off the flatbed and landed on top of him.

The car fell off of another flatbed two years later on the freeway, crashing onto the road and causing a fatal accident. In 1958 a truck carrying the Porsche was parked on a hillside in Oregon when the truck's brakes snapped and crashed into another car, shattering the windshield. While on display in New Orleans in 1959, the Silver Porsche 550 Spyder suddenly severed itself into eleven pieces. To this day the cause has been undetermined.

In 1960 the car was crated after an exhibit in Miami, Florida and put on a train bound for Los Angeles. When the boxcar was opened, the car had vanished. Its current whereabouts are unknown.


End file.
